By Wendy PlumpDepartment of Chemistry Benjamin Lienhard, a postdoctoral fellow with the Rabitz Group, was selected to attend the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting at Lake Constance, Germany this summer, a prestigious international forum that brings Nobel laureates together with the brightest young academics working today. The focus of this year’s gathering is physics, which…

By Ethan Wang ’26 with Wendy Plump Department of Chemistry Together, Ethan Wang ’26, an economics concentrator, and Wonju Lee, whose college career pauses as he serves in the South Korean Marine Corps, documented their year of learning quantum computing at Princeton Chemistry in our Quantum Bootcamp series. (Here are columns one, two, three, four,…

By Wendy PlumpDepartment of Chemistry From the 30K-foot level, Katerina Kanevche moved effortlessly from graduate student to postdoc to leader on a project whose goal is a novel imaging and molecular identification instrument that could transform the field of microscopy. In reality, she painstakingly acquired experience in a technique called tip-enhanced spectroscopy (TES), gaining skills…

By Wendy PlumpDepartment of Chemistry In a funding venture that could be transformational for imaging single molecules within a cell, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded a $3.4M grant to a collaboration between Princeton’s Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Biology. The four-year grant supports the development of a new microscope that will enable…

By Wonju Lee Undergraduate Wonju Lee contributes the entirety of this fifth column in our Quantum Bootcamp series, which details the journey he and Ethan Wang ’26 are pursuing in their independent study of quantum computing under Department of Chemistry postdoc Benjamin Lienhard of the Rabitz Group. This will be Wonju’s final column. He has…

By Ethan Wang and Wonju Lee, ’26 With this fourth installment in our Quantum Bootcamp series, undergraduates (and non-chemistry concentrators) Wonju Lee and Ethan Wang ‘26 had a lively discussion about lessons they’ve enjoyed so far under the guidance of Department of Chemistry postdoc Benjamin Lienhard of the Rabitz Lab. As a wrap-up at the…

By Ethan Wang ’26 The recent release of the movie “Oppenheimer” provides an opportunity for us in this, the third in our series of Quantum Bootcamp columns (here are columns One and Two), to discuss a bit of the history of quantum physics and Princeton University’s role in it. Let me take you on a…

By Wendy PlumpDepartment of Chemistry Suppose you’re asking a complex question in which a host of factors, or inputs, could contribute to the answer. In such a circumstance, each of the inputs will influence the certainty of your output answer to a varying degree. These factors could arise in almost any system that defies easy…

By Wendy PlumpDepartment of Chemistry Herschel Rabitz, the Charles Phelps Smyth ’16 *17 Professor of Chemistry, and Professional Specialist Alexei Goun, a research staff member in the Rabitz Group, as co-PIs have been named to an $11M Department of Energy funding package for projects in Quantum Information Science (QIS), announced this week. Spread over 10…

By Wendy PlumpDepartment of Chemistry There are many steps on the road to scientific advance, an axiom that is especially true for quantum technologies. Although progress over the past decade has put quantum computing firmly on the horizon, large scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing devices are currently just that – on the horizon. In the meantime,…